An influential house church leader who was reportedly kidnapped along with his son by Chinese security forces was released Monday, November 21, just hours after American President George W. Bush left China, a religious rights group said.
Masked gunmen shot and wounded a Christian couple in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi in the latest in a series of attacks against Christians there, police and hospital sources confirmed Monday, November 21.
For Ishaya Kpotun Shaba of Niger state in north-central Nigeria, the past four years have been a jumble of tears and pain. He has not set his eyes on his daughter, Saratu, since she was abducted in December 2001 at age 19 by extremists bent on converting and marrying her to a Muslim.
Denied permits and ordered not to worship in public or at home, churches in East Bekasi, West Java, have taken temporary refuge in a Social Affairs Agency office.
Beijing authorities on November 4 ordered a Chinese legal firm to suspend activities for a year, hours after top lawyer Gao Zhisheng filed court documents in defense of Pastor Cai Zhuohua.
Hindu extremists attacked 62-year-old Pastor Feroz Masih in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh on November 4, accusing him of “forcibly converting” Hindus and severely beating him.
Pastor Cai was abducted from a bus stop and dragged into a van by three plain-clothed State Security officers on September 11 2004. According to a former fellow inmate, Pastor Cai was repeatedly tortured with electric shocks and forced to give false confessions to serious charges.
Hindu extremists disrupted a large prayer gathering in the house of a Christian family in Pratapgarh district, Uttar Pradesh state, on Sunday (November 6).
Two Indonesian Christian girls were fighting for their lives late Tuesday, November 8, after they were shot in the head in Indonesia’s tense Poso region where three other Christian girls were beheaded last week, an influential religious rights organization said.
China’s government has ordered a top law firm in Beijing to close for one year because of its involvement in defending Christians, including house church leaders, and other religious minorities, a religious rights watchdog said.
About 30 Hindu extremists attacked a pastor, his wife and their driver in the western state of Gujarat on October 23. The three sustained internal injuries.
The leader of six house churches in China’s capital Beijing, who was detained by security officers last year, is held at a detention facility where he is forced to carry out hard labor, human rights investigators said Friday, October 28.
Shahjahan Mollah, 35, lives in the village of Butia about 120 miles north of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Shahjahan, a former Muslim, converted to Christianity in 1991. He currently pastors a church of some 27 Muslim converts to Christianity in Butia.
A U.S. Christian faces one year in prison after a trial in which he was accused of raping and beating Magda Refaat Gayed at his Cairo shelter for troubled women.
The Rev. Murtala Marti Dangora began his Christian life 25 years ago with a baptism of fire. While many people in Nigeria become Christians without difficulties, Rev. Dangora’s decision to convert from Islam brought an instant death sentence from Muslim authorities.
Former Muslim residents in a remote village of the ex-Soviet union republic of Uzbekistan are being beaten, publicly humiliated and forced from their homes and jobs for converting to Christianity, a news agency investigation religious persecution said Friday, October 21.
The China Aid Association learned that as of October 21, 2005 at 7:30am, following more than 25 hours of house arrest, all of the nearly 50 arrested house church leaders were released.
Cuban police forces closed down a Christian printing press and detained a pastor for distributing “subversive” materials amid a nationwide government crackdown on house churches and pro-democracy activists on the Communist island, dissident sources and human rights investigators said Tuesday, October 18.
Christian missionaries struggled to provide aid to earthquake victims in northern India Wednesday, October 19, after Christians and an education minister were among those killed in ethnic violence which rocked Assam state and Indian controlled Kashmir, Christian aid workers said.
Islamic militants have launched fresh raids on churches on the Indonesian island of Java, human rights investigators said Wednesday, October 19.